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American Sunday School Union's Huge Challenge

Dan Graves, MSL

As if they were one person, two thousand delegates jumped to their
feet. "Aye, aye," their bodies seemed to shout as they united in
approval of the measure just introduced.

It was on this day May 25, 1830 in
Philadelphia. Just six years earlier, on the same day, the American
Sunday School Union had adopted its name and constitution. Now the
members were pledging themselves to take on an enormous task. The
motion that had brought them to their feet was this:

"Resolved, that the American Sunday School Union, in reliance upon
Divine aid, will, within two years, establish a Sunday school in every
destitute place where it is practicable, throughout the Valley of the
Mississippi."

In just two years they hoped to reach over 4,000,000 people in an
area of over 1,300,000 square miles!

The first year the American Sunday School Union sent out 49
missionaries. The next year, they sent out 112. Such small numbers
could not hope to do the job alone. And, of course, they weren't
expected to. They were told to recruit helpers in every little
community. Their instructions could be boiled down to this: Start a
class, teach it, and where possible find a Christian man or woman
willing to lead it, give that person a bundle of books and tracts and
set him or her to work.

"We're all Presbyterians around here," someone might say in a
challenging tone. "What are you? A Methodist?" The missionary could
explain that his literature was non-denominational. It didn't promote
any particular church. Instead it offered studies straight from the
Bible. Thanks to the neutral tone of the lessons, the same Sunday
school could belong to everyone. In one Illinois village, a Sunday
school brought together three Catholic families, two Scottish
Presbyterian homes, three or four Anglican households, several Baptists
and some people who did not believe in Christ at all.

In those days there were few public schools. Sunday schools taught
people to read and showed them how they could become voters. That made
Sunday schools popular, making it possible for families to keep contact
with distant members through letter writing. Education drew them into
the life of the nation. And for families living alone in the woods or
on the prairie, it was wonderful to look up and see the unfamiliar face
of a missionary with news from the rest of the nation. Later, the
Sunday School Union published Christian fiction that made reading a lot
more fun for children.

The task was so big and the country was growing so fast that the job
didn't get done in two years or in three. In fact, the American Sunday
School Union was still hard at work under greatly different conditions
in 1974 when it changed its name to American Missionary Fellowship.

Bibliography:

Boylan, Anne M. Sunday School : the formation of an American
institution, 1790-1880. New Haven : Yale University Press,
c1988.

Fergusson, Edmund Morris. Historic Chapters in Christian
Education in America; a brief history of the American Sunday school
movement, and the rise of the modern church school. New York:
Fleming H. Revell Company, 1935.

"Our History and Heritage." American Missionary
Fellowship. http://www.americanmissionary.org/history.shtml

Seymour, Jack L. From Sunday school to church school :
continuities in protestant church education in the United States, 1860
- 1929. Washington, D.C. : University Press of America, 1982.